“Nice laptop,” my father says, eyeing the screen I’ve kept up all morning waiting for her, as if he’s also expecting someone to come galloping through on the Trojan. “Personally, I hate Macs.”
He removes his silver cigarette case, and though I point to no-smoking symbols all over the room, he lights up. Rules are superfluous to him. A decade ago, when Republicans in Congress tried to ban flag burning while civilians sued cigarette companies for hooking them on cancer, my father had American flags stenciled on his Dunhills, so he could burn old glory every time he lit up. Libertarian to his bones, he abhors too much government and too little personal responsibility. In other words, he’s been very lucky. He’s smoked for five decades, survived two heart attacks, is crammed with plastic tubes under his ribs, and outside he’s Dorian Gray — he’s been done, of course, a few slices around the eyes and chin, and keeps his finely cured mane a dark, distinguished gray. We all know the story: Something’s got to bear the scars. He lies back on my bed, defiantly kicking up his feet, and puffs, the edge of his cigarette curved down like a retired dick, and I hate how sex seeps into every inch of me. He spills on the carpet, deliberately. I unwrap a glass, take it to the bathroom, and run the tap.
“Let me tell you something, Jen,” he shouts from the bed. “Time is an invidious mind fuck. You look around one day and everything’s unfamiliar. All these people working for you, they’re little womblets, your favorite suit’s hopelessly out of date, rings don’t fit, and even though you’re getting fat, and I’m talking way beyond love handles, it feels like you’re evaporating.”
I hold the water glass in front of him.
“Your brother was lucky,” he says, and I feel a hole opening in my chest. “There’s something to be said for pissing away the whole damn thing.”
“He was twenty-five. He drove into a mountain going ninety miles an hour, and don’t pretend you don’t know why.”
“He was never that bright.”
Chest throbbing, the glass in my hand shakes. “Why do you have to be such an asshole? You almost had me feeling something for you.”
“What? The kid was born with one testicle, couldn’t read until he was eight... He might have been retarded.”
I throw the water in his face.
“Hey!” he shouts, sitting up and shaking a few drops from his hair. The bodyguards step toward me but he warns them off. “Listen to me: Whenever you went away, he slept in your goddamn bed, his head on that little monkey thing looking like — Serena always said you two acted really weird together.”
“What are you saying?”
“Maybe there’s another side of the story where I’m not the villain, maybe it’s you.”
“Fuck you!” I stammer backwards, then regain my footing. “And fuck this... And you know what? I fucked your girlfriend last night.”
He stands up, towering over me, and gives his head a final shake. A bead of water hits my nose like a razor. “Jen, Jen, Jen,” he says, “do you think I’m stupid? You think I don’t know what’s going on here? Why do you think—” He slips forward, punches his right hand against his heart, eyes squeezed together tightly, then through gritted teeth to one of his bodyguards: “You need to get me somewhere.”
Oldest of the three competitive skating sports, speed skating is the most misunderstood. It lacks the glorious partnerships that give figure skating its connubial thrill, compounding defeat with total psychological annihilation. Gone too is the vicious orgy of hockey, players so convinced they’re one organism they think nothing of slamming their stick over the head of the opposition. Speed skating, especially long track, is more psychological. You study your enemy, learn her mind, her methods, so you can defeat her. But when it comes down to it, you’re out there circling those three thousand meters of ice alone.
I am outside Tel Aviv, perhaps not far from where I heedlessly entered Gila last night, in a hospital waiting room with Dan the bodyguard. We sit together looking at Israeli magazines, CNN. On screen, an orthodox woman with a New York accent cries, “Never did I think I’d live to see my country take away my home!” Dan nods in agreement, calls government officials Palestinian sympathizers, trying to enlist me in this opinion, but I’ve heard how the settlers steered their Trojan horses, sometimes carting possessions into Gaza under cover of night, and once you’re in, well, my father might say possession is nine-tenths of the law, if I hadn’t laid him flat on his back. Or perhaps it was her, lips dripping enough to sink a fucking fleet — how else would he have known... unless they’d planned it. I can’t figure out who’s playing who, I’m not that bright, but this country has a way of raising the stakes.
I bury my head in my hands, feel a palm on my back, Dan whispering, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” and though I’m not sure what he means, I let him rub my shoulders until the doctor comes out.
He won’t shake my hand, he’s orthodox, but in Hebrew says the rabbi will be fine. “His heart is strong, the hardware is doing its job, perhaps he ate something.”
“The rabbi?”
“Of course, he is first a father to you.”
“I’d like to see him.”
One. If I were a suicide bomber
Anyone here will tell you it’s easier getting out than in. But decades of terrorism have refined suspicion of air travel into policy. After the towers fell — the first and only time I remember seeing my father truly unhinged, he knew so many people who worked on high floors, and his lawyer and best friend, Chuck Birnbaum, had been finishing up a cozy breakfast at Windows on the World with a young woman who was not Chuck’s wife — America turned to Israel for lessons in airport security. But nobody takes seriously questions from U.S. airline workers about whose hands might have fondled their luggage, not even the interrogators. At Ben-Gurion, men (and the odd woman) trained in espionage do the asking, randomly swapping questions to make even the most seasoned traveler squirm.
When they finally get to me, I’m as wilted as the city outside and long past counting. For the past hour, I’ve tried to forget I am a Trojan horse, crammed with hot accounts and registers where two nights earlier Gila’s heated tongue had trailed, the spoils of my father’s dirty little war, and perhaps it’s his dream of dying in the Holy Land, how sickly and unkempt he looked in that hospital bed despite the doctor’s assertions as he clued me in: I am carrying the key to every one of his off-shore accounts, decades of profits gleaned from his years on Wall Street and reinvested all over this tiny country, even in the settlements, which pleased neither the Israeli government nor the opposition — how did he ever talk me into this?
“Who is taking care of your children?” a security officer asks in English, after checking my fake passport and itinerary.
“My sister-in-law,” I shrug, suitably religious, maternal, uxorial. “She knows how difficult it is for me to leave my family.”
He nods, mama’s boy through and through, and part of me thinks it’s too easy, this is El Al, and another part feels like skating, feels like sex, the world heightened into a short incandescent stretch, and maybe that’s the big secret of crime: It’s exhilarating. The officer flips again through my passport, then slaps it back and forth against his palm. “Why are you carrying only one bag?” he asks.
“It’s all I need.”
“No gifts for anyone?”
“I’m cheap.”
He smirks, and I am through security: mule, liar, my father’s emissary, feeling closer to him than I can ever remember, but he’s warned me — there are undercover security people on every flight.